In early December, a few lucky Bob Dylan fans in Europe came across a new release titled “50th Anniversary Collection 1973” in scattered record stores. The 28-track compilation contains exclusively studio outtakes from the soundtrack sessions for the western film “Pat Garrett and Billy The Kid”. Great excitement within the (Dylan) collectors’ guild.
Since the discs were only on sale sporadically, the bids for the few copies available on online sales platforms soon exceeded the 500 euro or 100 dollar mark. Despite the princely prices, the collector hunt now seems to be continuing happily…
Anniversary releases have long been common practice in the rock and pop world, often in December for the “Christmas business”. The background is a provision in European copyright law that provides for a “Use It Or Lose it” clause, according to which all unused sound recordings enter the public domain if they are not published 50 years after they were created.
In the last ten years, this legal situation has led major bands such as Pink Floyd, The Rolling Stones and Bob Dylan to remove large stocks of live recordings and studio outtakes from their vaults in order to continue to protect their own copyrights.
Some artists place these on streaming services, others opt for a “collectors” version in the physical release.
Bob Dylan’s team has solved this problem in different ways over the years. When the copyright deadline for the outtakes from his first three electric albums (“Bringing It All Back Home”, “Highway 61 Revisited” and “Blonde on Blonde”) threatened to expire, they released a mega box set for die-hard fans and a two -Record set with highlights for “Rudi casual fans”.
“Pat Garrett Sessions” leaked several decades ago
When the deadline for releasing more obscure parts of Dylan’s career expired, around 300 CDs were simply pressed and sent without notice to random European record dealers to meet legal requirements.
The just-released 1973 collection will largely be familiar to die-hard Dylan fans, as the so-called “Pat Garrett sessions” were leaked several decades ago.
Former Old Crow Medicine Show singer and guitarist Chris “Critter” Fuqua received a copy of the pirated version during a family trip to London when he was still in high school, which he passed on to his bandmate Ketch Secor.
He was extremely enthusiastic about the song fragment “Rock Me Mama”, in which Dylan and his bandmates were fooling around a little shortly after recording “Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door”.
Ketch Secor then expanded the composition into a finished work and eventually released it as “Wagon Wheel” on the Old Crow Medicine Show’s 2004 self-titled LP. The song became the group’s signature song and found an even larger audience starting in 2013 when Darius Rucker took it to No. 1 on the country charts.
The Old Crow Medicine Show returned to the Pat Garrett sessions in 2014, when Fuqua and Secor recorded and finished “Sweet Amarillo,” another song fragment from that era.
In 2023, this obscure pop culture circle will close, with the Dylan team now appearing in the collector cosmos themselves.